Turin, Italy ? Some folks think it looks like a doughnut. Others see a bagel. Or a giant Life Saver, or a compact disc.

An Austrian Olympian used it as an eye patch. Whatever the view, it really is an Olympic medal.

Designed by Italians who thought long and hard about the best way to symbolize their country, the Turin medals are very different from any predecessor.

Which is to say, for the first time in Winter Games history, the gold, silver and bronze all have a hole in the middle.

Designer Dario Quatrini says the hole represents the open space of an Italian piazza, or city square. Except the medal isn’t square at all – it’s round. And when worn, Quatrini has explained, it has yet another meaning:

“Circling and revealing the area near the heart and focusing attention on the athlete’s vital energy and human emotions,” says the Turin Olympic Committee.

Germany's Sylke Otto poses with her gold medal after the medal ceremony for the women's single luge. Otto mined her gold Wednesday in Turin, Italy.

Wednesday, after winning the women’s downhill in San Sicario, Michaela Dorfmeister of Austria smiled broadly and held her gold medal to her cheek, then squinted through the opening as if it were a peephole.

Near the stage where the medals ceremonies are held in Turin, Anna Maria Russo was not impressed.

“I don’t like them,” said Russo, who traveled to the games from Cuneo, a town to the south, and was strolling downtown in the Piazza San Carlo.

“I’m a traditionalist,” she declared.

The symbolism is lost on her.

“That hole in the middle gives a sense of emptiness,” she said. “The old medals gave a more concrete feeling; they gave you the sense of the accomplishment behind them.”

Marco Leoni didn’t get it, either. A steelworker who journeyed from Varese, north of Milan, to follow ice hockey, Leoni said he wasn’t so sure there was a connection between the holes and piazzas.

“They’re supposed to be a square? They look more like doughnuts or rings to me.”

The medals of the Turin games, from left, silver, gold and bronze, have a hole in the middle that represents the open space of a piazza, an Italian square.

Nonetheless, he wasn’t put off. “I like them,” he said. “They’re original.”

Which is what every host city is dreams of while deciding what the ultimate award of sports excellence should look like. The Winter Games, unlike the Summer Olympics, allows organizers great freedom in designing the shape and size and content of medals. That, as well as creating the competitions’ logos and slogans, are all done at the local level.

At the 1994 Lillehammer Games in Norway, for instance, the medals contained sparagmite, a stone extracted from the ski jump site. At Nagano in 1998, Japanese organizers used lacquer. In 2002, at Salt Lake City, the medals weren’t round at all, but rather had uneven edges that were supposed to look like river rocks found in Utah streams and rivers.

Some critics said they resembled cow pies.

Turin’s medals have the city’s Olympic logo on one side – a stylized profile of its biggest landmark, the Mole Antonelliana, the giant, spire-topped dome that houses a cinema museum. On the other are images of individual sports.

And according to IOC guidelines, gold medals must contain at least six grams of the precious metal.

But in the end, to the athletes who win one, the issue has nothing to do with size, shape or doughnuts.

Jennifer Heil of Canada won a gold medal in women’s moguls on the opening day of competition. She said she likes hers just fine.

“I just wanted it to be heavy, because I knew there was, like, a big hole in it, and I wasn’t disappointed.

“I think it’s really cool.”